Wednesday, September 16, 2015

“I enjoy talking
to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you
happen to be insane.”

George Orwell.1984.

“Stanley Motss: I bet
you're great at chess.

Conrad Brean: I
would be if I could remember how all the pieces moved.”

Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. Wag the Dog.

“Nick Naylor: I talk for
my job – basically.

Child: Can’t
anybody do that?

Nick Naylor: No –
it requires a certain moral flexibility that most people lack.”

Aaron Eckhart. Thank You for Smoking.

The Autobiography of
Ben and Bob

Chapter 11: “You say
you did what when you were
fourteen?!?”

Okay, it’s chapter
eleven. By now, he must start sharing some actual life events if this is to be
considered an “autobiography”, right? And, what’s the deal with this being the
autobiography of two people? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Who is this Bob guy,
anyway? How come he hasn’t shown up for his own biography yet?

All great questions – to be answered in
due course. Bob has already showed up in this autobiography in a cameo role and
will be back again soon. Meanwhile, I have to disappoint you as this chapter is
also about Ben.

At a recent job interview, I was asked
what Bill Gates is like in person. After answering, I mentioned in an off-hand
manner that I had also worked for Steve Jobs for about a year even though it
doesn’t show up on my resume. The short story is that I worked on a new PowerPC
based system at NeXT which was cancelled days before it was to be announced –
when Steve Jobs decided to abandon hardware and instead standardize on the
Intel x86 architecture and concentrate on software instead. In hindsight, this
was absolutely the right decision for the company but, at the time, being the
hot headed engineer that I was, I left in a pique over the cancellation. How
dare they cancel my project? Of
course, Mr. Jobs triumphantly returned to Apple a couple of years later and the
rest is history.

The conversation reminded me of all the
other jobs I’ve had: starting with the dishwashing job at a steak house - at a
whopping $2.60 an hour; to the part time programming I did on the side for one
of my college professors - at a dizzying $7.50 an hour; to the midnight-to-noon
weekend graveyard shift as a sysadmin - at a stratospheric $10 an hour; to the
part-time Teaching Assistant gig at college, working with Math students and
wondering why and how they had gotten so far without understanding fractions or
decimal points in high school; to the part time programming job, every other
weekend, fixing bugs in a medical billing application in some arcane language
on an ancient PDP10 machine which no one else was either able or willing to
touch, at a laugh-to-the-bank rate of $15 an hour. I could keep going but you
get the idea.

So many odd jobs, the proceeds therein
going to partly fund my undergraduate career as a starving foreign student. The
fact that I often held two or even three of these jobs simultaneously seemed
natural. Working and studying eighty, ninety, a hundred hours a week seemed
natural at the time - a requirement for survival.

Having landed in Boston as a lone fourteen year
old, fresh off the boat from a war torn country in the grip of a revolution, I
somehow seem to have managed not only to survive but to thrive as well.

The less I say about the old country, the
better. I remember skipping school and joining demonstrations in the streets - not
because I agreed with any of the revolutionary groups but mostly just to avoid
going to school. I remember schools being closed for months at a time due to
unrest. I remember the odd feeling of hearing gun shots in the street outside
and seeing cars burning in the streets while the TV news broadcasts calmly
announced that “all is well” - due to Government censorship. I distinctly
remember the day when this policy was reversed and the first time I saw all the
violence on TV. I remember reading books about torture, about communism, about
politics and revolution. It was eye opening to a thirteen year old. You grow up
very quickly in such an environment. My parents, like so many other parents of
teenagers, decided that it would be safer to send me overseas to continue my
education.

Having already spent a few months in the
UK, I arrived in the US with ignorance and confidence: ignorance of the
monumental task ahead of me - just to survive in this country - and confidence
built out of that ignorance: confidence in my own ability to put up with
whatever comes along - to roll with it, so to say. Not being burdened by
parents, a host family, or the regulations of a dormitory meant I could - and
often did - get into a lot of trouble. Let’s just say there was a lot of
underage drinking in bars and dancing in discos. No one ever asked me for an ID
back in those days. The only saving grace was that I never got into drugs – too
expensive!

Somehow, while all this was going on, I managed
to finish the last three years of high school in a single calendar year, even
with the hindrance of English as a second language, and arrive in college at age
fifteen. Fast forward two and a half years and, somehow, I managed to graduate
from college with two bachelor’s degrees - in psychology and computer science -
at the still tender age of seventeen. Washing dishes to pay the bills was just
part of the equation.

I'm not writing this to boast. Friends and
strangers have often wondered in hindsight how I zipped through school so
quickly. At the time, it didn't seem like such a big deal. I was just doing the
tasks in front of me and happened to do them more quickly than others. What's
the big deal? I had much bigger problems to deal with, what with the life of
the lone teenage foreign student with minimal funds amounting to not much more
than moldy basement apartments shared with four guys you just met last week, a
sojourn with an extremely OCD guy as a roommate for a month (we're talking
bouncing quarters off of bedsheets OCD), and another apartment with a
dangerously tilting floor.

The point is, I've made so many mistakes in
life and made so many decisions for the wrong reasons that I'm personally
baffled at how I've ended up doing so well overall.Despite this hodgepodge of a background and a
similarly checkered career, I seem to have done reasonably well by most
measures. I'm thankful for that - thankful to all the people who have helped me
along the way.

I've also been blessed with a family that has
supported me in all my harebrained ideas and decisions. Picking up and moving
across the country for a job I like or quitting a job on the spur of the moment
are just a couple of the examples from my professional career. My wife always
says, "That's great, honey. You just go right ahead and do it. As long as
you get out of the house."